Accelerating Future

From Nanowerk News:

Twisting spires, concentric rings, and gracefully bending petals are a few of the new three-dimensional shapes that University of Michigan engineers can make from carbon nanotubes using a new manufacturing process.

The process is called “capillary forming,” and it takes advantage of capillary action, the phenomenon at work when liquids seem to defy gravity and travel up a drinking straw of their own accord.

The new miniature shapes, which are difficult if not impossible to build using any material, have the potential to harness the exceptional mechanical, thermal, electrical, and chemical properties of carbon nanotubes in a scalable fashion, said A. John Hart, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and in the School of Art & Design.

They could lead to probes that can interface with individual cells and tissues, novel microfluidic devices, and new materials with a custom patchwork of surface textures and properties.

A paper on the research is published in the October edition of Advanced Materials, and is featured on the cover.

“It’s easy to make carbon nanotubes straight and vertical like buildings,” Hart said. “It hasn’t been possible to make them into more complex shapes. Assembling nanostructures into three-dimensional shapes is one of the major goals of nanotechnology. The method of capillary forming could be applied to many types of nanotubes and nanowires, and its scalability is very attractive for manufacturing.”

Nanotubes are among the strongest and most versatile materials possible given the laws of nature. Exploiting their full potential will be a key element of taking technology to an entirely new level.

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appdev asks:

Why can’t we just tell the AI to do everything we want and nothing we don’t? Why would it do anything else, ever? Give it a list of stuff you want and let it do the research and achieve those things. Then keep it in a waiting loop or, more usefully, in an info acquisition loop, sort of a learning-coma, until asked for new things. How could it start doing things it’s not asked for, especially if doing anything not on our wish list is explicitly forbidden?

This is a good question. Why not? Well, here’s a few reasons why not.

Great power should be put into responsible hands. AGI is great power. AGI should be put into moral hands superior to humanity’s. A crucial aspect of superintelligence should be supermorality — otherwise, why would it be desirable?

The other problem is specifying what we want.

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A new article by David Pearce is up at H+ magazine. As a transhumanist staunchly in favor of the Hedonistic Imperative, I welcome this. Here are the reasons:



1) We Shall Soon Be Able To Choose Our Own Level Of Pain-Sensitivity
2) We Can Soon Choose How Rewarding We Want Our Daily Life To Be
3) Steak Lovers and Vegans Alike Can Soon Eat Cruelty-Free Diets
4) Carnivorous Nonhuman Predators Can Be Phased Out Too
5) We May Be On The Eve Of An “Intelligence Explosion”

1-2 are “old” transhumanist ideas, 3 is in vitro meat (new-ish), 4 is David’s good recent idea, and 5 is an idea more than a century old, but only given real attention since the founding of SIAI in 2000.

What good is transhumanism if it can’t eliminate suffering for people and animals?

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A Singularity Institute donor and Singularity Summit sponsor, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn understands the risk of advanced artificial intelligence. Estonian Public Broadcasting recently covered his remarks on the topic:

Jaan Tallinn, one of the founders of Skype, believes humans may succeed in creating artificial intelligence by midcentury.

Tallinn told uudised.err.ee that in order to create artificial intelligence, two important problems need to be solved. “First, we need to ensure that a self-correcting system will stay true to its initial purpose. Secondly, we need to solve a more difficult problem – to determine what we actually want. What are those initial goals for a computer that is given super intelligence?” Tallinn asked.

He added that there could be negative outcomes if artificial intelligence is more powerful than humans but cannot interpret human values. “If a computer needs to get carbon atoms, and it doesn’t care about humans, then it would think the easiest place to get them is from humans. It would be more difficult to acquire them from the air,” said Tallinn.

It is hard to say what qualifies as artificial intelligence, said Enn Tõugu, senior researcher of the Cybernetics Institute at the Tallinn University of Technology. “I can’t really even tell you what exactly is intelligence, intellect, reason or knowledge,” he said.

“I tend to think that we can talk about intelligence as a human quality […] that computers can possibly attain. To some degree, it already is so. For example, I see such beginnings in Google,” Tõugu said.

To modify the above slightly, to achieve artificial intelligence, those two problems should be solved — they won’t necessarily be. Creating artificial intelligence without making a self-modifying system stable or accurately specifying what we want could be a species-ending disaster, but entirely possible. In fact, economic pressures may make it more likely than the alternative — Friendly AI.

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One study described at Time.com claims that many obese people are happy with the way they are. Another study, at PhysOrg, reports that Latinas tend to be fatalistic about cancer:

To assess whether they were fatalistic, women were asked to what extent they agreed or disagreed with statements such as “cancer is like a death sentence,” “cancer is God’s punishment,” “illness is a matter of chance,” “there is little that I can do to prevent cancer,” “it does not do any good to try to change the future because the future is in the hands of God.”

The dynamics operating in both cases may be slightly different, but the fatalism is the same. People are often happy with things the way they are because worrying or actually doing something seem like too much trouble, or even theologically presumptuous. Thus, it’s no surprise that many people aren’t interested in cryonics. If you could prove that it worked, that would certainly change people’s attitudes, but until then, we should predict low adoption rates for cryonics. Medical “fatalism” is common to everyone — the question is at which degree one becomes fatalistic. Put another way, everyone has limited time and money to invest in medicine, and everyone has a different threshold at which they care about it. The standard of mainstream acceptability moves towards the direction of more care rather than less over time, which might not always be a good thing, when the interventions aren’t proven to be beneficial.

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Writing in Lightspeed Magazine: “Considering Cryonics”. Benford makes a note of the odd phenomenon whereby sci-fi greats played around with the concept of cryonics in their stories but never actually signed up for it:

Ray Bradbury once told me he was interested in any chance of seeing the future, but when he thought over cryonics, he realized that he would be torn away from everything he loved. What would the future be worth, he asked, without his wife, his children, his friends? No, he told me, wouldn’t take the option at any price.

This is an example of the “neighborhood” argument, which says that mature people are so entwined with their surroundings, people and habits of mind, that to yank them out is a trauma worse than death. One is fond of one’s own era, certainly. But it seems to me that ordinary immigrants from every era have faced similar challenges and managed to adjust and make freer, better lives in their new homes. Just ask your grandparents.

I’ve met quite a few people against cryonics for this reason — anyone in the audience who holds this belief want to expound on their personal feelings about it?

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Tom McCabe, a long-time friend and associate of mine, recently did an interview with h+ magazine. He will also be on FastForward Radio tonight at 7PM PST/10PM EST. Tom is promoting an upcoming conference, Humanity+ @ Caltech, which will be held December 4-5 in Pasadena, CA. I wish I would go, but unfortunately the dates conflict with my presentation at the Society for Risk Analysis conference in Salt Lake City. I hope everyone has a great conference there at Caltech!

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Do you excel in any of the following areas?

• Electrical Engineering
• Mechanical Engineering
• Image Analysis
• Thin Film Deposition
• Business Operations
• Electron Microscopy
• Systems Integration
• Materials Science
• MEMS
• Applied Physics
• Computer Science
• Automation / Robotics
• Organometallic Chemistry
• Microfluidics
• Optics

More details on necessary skills is available here.

If so, and you’re interested in working for the most exciting biotech startup in California and possibly even the world, I encourage you to send me your resume and a short letter describing your skills and interests. You can learn more about Halcyon Molecular at the website, updates, and technology pages.

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting John Furber, an anti-aging scientist known as the founder of Legendary Pharmaceuticals. The company’s homepage has an excellent introduction to the biology of aging and senescence, and a giant chart with over a hundred nodes and links describing the process of aging. (I got to see a large poster version, which really had an impressive visual effect.) Furber’s analysis of the mechanisms of aging are interesting because it strongly parallels Aubrey de Grey’s but with a slightly different emphasis and other things to say. Furber has an article out in the hot-off-the-press Springer compilation The Future of Aging “Repairing Extracellular Aging and Glycation”. He also has a nutrition page on his website.

Furber has been building on his graph for ten years, so it is very well researched.

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You can find it here.

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Here’s the website. Humanity+ @ CalTech is hosted by the California Institute of Technology and ab|inventio, the invention factory behind QLess, Whozat, SocialDiligence and MyNew.TV.

The speakers list is a mix of the usual suspects and some new names. The usual suspects include Randal Koene, Suzanne Gildert, Michael Vassar, Max More, Nastasha Vita-More, Bryan Bishop, Patri Friedman, Ben Goertzel, and Gregory Benford. If you were following my tweets from this weekend you’ll recall that Benford announced StemCell¹⁰⁰(tm) at the Life Extension Conference in Burlingame, which is a product of LifeCode, a spinoff company of Genescient.

The conference is partially being organized by my friend Tom McCabe, who was recently voted on to the Board of Directors of Humanity+. Please let Tom know (his email is at his website) if you want to help sponsor the event!

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